European “Open Internet” is a joke
The latest press release about “Roaming charges and Open Internet” from the European Commission is quite deceptive and you shouldn’t be fooled.
The new texts certainly seem to be a step in the right direction, but they seem more like sugar-coated gifts to the telecom industry, to perpetuate short-sighted awful conditions for Internet consumers.
Roaming, it’s not going away
What goes away is todays definition of roaming, in todays world when you subscribe to a French smartphone contract, and use it in Germany, your provider might charge you with very expensive roaming costs.
With the new regulations you would be allowed to use your existing flat-rate in other countries, but you can get charged additional fees up to 75% of the existing roaming costs if you happen to consume all of your contracts flat-rate.
In a world where Internet services are increasing in quality and quantity, this is extremely short-sighted planning, and will lead to the exact same situation in only a few years.
It is also regrettable that consumers can’t subscribe to offers in other EU member states and permanently use them wherever they like in the European Union as a free market should allow. I guess the free market is meant to empower the corporations, not the consumers. Good one EU.
Open Internet is not Net Neutrality
The EU Commission has made up a term that sounds like what you want, sadly this term is far away from the foundation of Net Neutrality.
The “Open Internet” doesn’t integrate the principle of Net Neutrality, instead it vaguely incorporates certain aspects of it, for example it defines that content must be treated equally and delivered no mater its nature, it also makes zero rating illegal, these are good things, but are very loopholy.
Worst, these principles are abandoned for “special services”, like medicine, automated driving, robotics, television,… This fundamentally jeopardises the Internet as we know it, it increases the difficulty for innovations with little means, and puts the future of the Internet at risk by allowing its network to stagnate, while “special services” profit from better network conditions where providers are allowed to charge consumers with extra fees.
If we put this in perspective: 10-15 years ago some companies worked on innovative products and softwares like P2P, VOIP, Streaming, etc. If the same texts had been in force in 2000 as they will be in 2016, they could have categorised Skype or YouTube into “special services”, because at this point in time all criteria would have been met to do so. Providers could have argued that these are “special services”, and you need to pay for it!
These services wouldn’t be part of today’s “Open Internet” ecosystem if this Law existed back then. That’s the risk we face with futur services.
Data caps are still a thing
You know how once “unlimited” meant unlimited, and not something absurd like “300Gb” for a DSL Internet connection, or “500Mb” for a smartphone plan until you get to enjoy the speeds of 28k modems and prompted to update for only 5.99€ to enjoy 500 additional megabytes?
In certain countries providers even capped at some ridiculous amounts of data usage like 10 or 20Gb for a simple DSL connexion until recently.
This practice isn’t going away, you’ll still pay 30 euros for a 300Gb DSL connexion in Germany, while the same price grants you with only 1Gb data plan on your smartphone.
This is particularly outrageous as most of the Internet communications happen on phones these days.
Welcome to 21st century Europe.
Got comments? Please tell me how wrong I am, I really want this to be wrong.
